The world wide web (“the web”) permits companies and individuals to electronically publish content in the form of web pages that can be retrieved and displayed using a browser program running on a client computer system. Such “publishers” often sell to advertisers opportunities to present advertising messages together with their published content.
For example, an advertiser who is a music publisher may purchase opportunities to present an advertising message promoting a new music CD published by the publisher. The advertising message may be “rich” in a variety of ways. They may, for example, include text identifying the title of the CD and the responsible artist in a style that is visually compatible with an appealing background pattern and/or color, a series of multiple photos of the artist, a link to a web page on which the user can listen to the artist's music and purchase the CD, etc.
It is common for advertising messages to be “linked” to a web page, such that, when a user to whom an advertising message clicks on the advertising message or otherwise selects it, this web page is loaded and displayed. A web page having this role with respect to an advertising message is sometimes referred to as a “landing page” for the advertising message. To continue the example above, when a user clicks on the music CD advertising message, (also referred to as “clicking through” the advertising message), a landing page containing a track list and ordering mechanism for the music CD may be loaded and displayed.